The Fifth Woman (58 page)

“What was she doing then?” Wallander asked.

“There are big gaps.”

“Is she married?”

“She’s single.”

“Divorced?”

“There are no children in the picture. I don’t think she’s ever been married. But the times that she was working on the trains match Katarina Taxell’s.”

Martinsson had been reading from his notebook. Now he dropped it on the table.

“There’s one more thing. She’s active in the Swedish Railways Recreational Association in Malmö. I think a lot of people are. But what surprised me was that she was interested in weight training.”

It got very quiet in the room.

“So she’s presumably strong,” Martinsson continued. “And isn’t it a woman with great physical strength that we’re looking for?”

Wallander made a quick decision.

“We’ll put all the other names aside for the time being and work on Yvonne Ander. Take it from the beginning one more time. Slowly.”

Martinsson repeated his summary. They came up with new questions. Many of the answers were missing. Wallander looked at his watch. It was just before midnight.

“I think we should talk to her tonight.”

“If she’s not working,” Höglund said. “She works on the night train occasionally. The other conductors work days or nights, never both.”

“Either she’s home or she’s not,” Wallander said.

“What are we actually going to talk to her about?”

The question came from Hamrén. It was legitimate.

“I think it’s possible that Katarina Taxell might be there,” Wallander said. “If nothing else, we can use that as an excuse. Her mother is worried. We can start with that. We have no evidence against her. We don’t have a thing. But I want to get some fingerprints.”

“So we’re not sending a whole team,” Svedberg said.

Wallander nodded at Höglund.

“I thought the two of us should visit her. We can have another car follow as backup. In case something happens.”

“Like what?” Martinsson asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Isn’t that a little irresponsible?” Svedberg said. “We do suspect she’s involved in murder.”

“We’ll be armed,” Wallander said.

They were interrupted by a man from the dispatch centre knocking on the door.

“There’s a message from a doctor in Lund,” he said. “He did a preliminary examination of the skeletal remains you found. He thinks they’re from a woman. And they’ve been in the ground a long time.”

“So we know that,” Wallander said. “If nothing else, we’re on our way to solving a 27-year-old case.”

The officer left the room.

“I don’t anticipate any trouble,” Wallander said.

“How are we going to explain it if Taxell isn’t there? After all, we’re thinking of knocking on her door in the middle of the night.”

“We’ll ask for Katarina,” Wallander said. “We’re looking for her. That’s all.”

“What happens if she’s not home?”

Wallander didn’t have to think it over.

“Then we go in. And the officers acting as backup will watch in case she’s on her way home. In the meantime I’d like to ask the rest of you to wait here. I know it’s late, but it can’t be helped.”

No-one had any objections.

They left the police station just after midnight. The wind was now at gale force. Wallander and Höglund took her car. Martinsson and Svedberg were in the backup car. Liregatan was right in the middle of Ystad. They parked a block away. The streets were almost deserted. They met only one other car, one of the police night patrols. Wallander wondered if the planned new cycle commando unit would be able to handle patrol duty when it was blowing as hard as it was now.

Yvonne Ander lived in a flat in a restored wood and brick building. Hers was the middle of three flats, with her door facing the street. Apart from a light on in a window to the far left, the whole building was in darkness.

“Either she’s asleep or she’s not home,” Wallander said. “But we have to assume she’s there.”

The wind was blowing hard.

“Is she the one?” Höglund asked.

Wallander was freezing cold and out of sorts. Was it because they were now hunting a woman?

“Yes,” he replied, “I think she is.”

They crossed the street. To their left was Martinsson and Svedberg’s car, the headlights turned off. Höglund rang the bell. Wallander pressed his ear to the door and could hear the bell ringing inside. They waited tensely. He nodded to her to ring again. Still nothing. Then a third time, with the same result.

“Do you think she’s asleep?” Höglund asked.

“No,” Wallander said, “I don’t think she’s home.”

He tried the door. It was locked. He took a step into the street and waved at the car. Martinsson came walking up. He was the best at opening locked doors without using force. He had a torch and a bundle of tools with him. Wallander held the light while Martinsson worked. It took him more than ten minutes. Finally he got the lock to open. He took the torch and went back to the car.

Wallander looked around. There was no-one about. He and Höglund went inside. They stood listening to the silence. There was no window in the hall. Wallander turned on a lamp. To the left was a living room with a low ceiling, to the right a kitchen. Straight ahead a narrow staircase led to an upper floor. It creaked under their feet. There were three bedrooms, all empty. There was no-one in the flat.

He tried to take stock of the situation. Could they count on the woman who lived there coming back during the night? He thought it highly unlikely. Especially since she had Taxell and her baby with her. Would she move them around at night?

Wallander walked up to a glass door in one of the bedrooms and discovered a balcony outside. Big flowerpots filled almost the entire space. But there were no flowers in them, just soil. The balcony and the empty flowerpots filled him with sudden dismay. He left the room quickly. They returned to the hall.

“Get Martinsson,” he said. “And ask Svedberg to drive back to the station. They have to keep looking. I think Yvonne Ander has another residence besides this flat. Maybe a house.”

“Shouldn’t we have some surveillance on the street?”

“She won’t come back tonight. But you’re right, we should have. Ask Svedberg to take care of it.”

Höglund was just about to leave when he held her back. Then he looked around. He went into the kitchen and lit the lamp over the bench. There were two dirty cups there. He wrapped them in a handkerchief and handed them to her.

“Prints,” he said. “Get Svedberg to give them to Nyberg. This could be crucial.”

He went back upstairs, hearing Höglund shut the front door behind her. He stood still in the dark, then did something that surprised even him. He went in the bathroom, picked up a towel, and sniffed it. He smelled the faint scent of a special perfume. But the smell reminded him of something else. He tried to capture the mental image. The memory of a scent. He sniffed the towel again, but he couldn’t pin it down. Even though he knew he was close. He had smelled that scent somewhere else. He couldn’t remember where or when, but it had been quite recently. He jumped when he heard the door open. Martinsson and Höglund appeared on the stairs.

“Now we have to start looking,” said Wallander. “We’re searching not only for something to connect her to the murders, but for something that indicates where she has another residence.”

“Why should she have?” Martinsson asked.

They were whispering, as if the person they were looking for was close by and might hear them.

“Katarina Taxell,” Wallander said. “Her baby. And we’ve believed all along that Runfeldt was held captive for three weeks. I’m sure that it wasn’t here, in the middle of Ystad.”

Martinsson and Höglund started work upstairs. Wallander closed the curtains in the living room and turned on some lamps. Then he stood in the middle of the room and turned slowly. The woman who lived here had beautiful furniture. And she smoked. He saw an ashtray on a little table next to a leather sofa. There were no cigarette butts in it, but there were faint traces of ashes. Paintings and photographs hung on the walls. Still lifes, vases of flowers, not very well done. Down in the lower right corner of one was a signature:
Anna Ander 1958
. A relative. Ander was an unusual surname. It figured in the history of Swedish crime, although he couldn’t recall how. He looked at one of the framed photographs. A Scanian farm. The picture was taken from above at an angle. Wallander guessed that the photographer had been standing on a roof or a tall ladder. He walked around the room, trying to feel her presence. He wondered why it was so difficult. Everything gave an impression of abandonment, he thought. A prim, pedantic abandonment. She isn’t here very often. She spends her time somewhere else.

He went over to her little desk next to the wall. Through the gap in the curtain he glimpsed a small yard. The window was draughty. He pulled out the chair, sat down and tried the biggest drawer. It was unlocked. A car passed by. Wallander saw the headlights catch a window and disappear. Then only the wind remained.

In the drawer were bundles of letters. He found his glasses and took out the top bundle. The sender was A. Ander, and the letter was sent from an address in Spain. He took out the letter and quickly scanned it. It was clear at once that Anna Ander was her mother. She was describing a trip. On the last page she wrote that she was on her way to Africa. The letter was dated April 1993. He put back the letter on the top of the bundle. The floorboards upstairs were creaking. He stuck one hand inside the drawer. Nothing. He started to go through the other drawers. Even paper can feel abandoned, he thought. He found nothing to make him take notice. It was too empty to be natural. Now he was convinced that she lived somewhere else. He kept going through the drawers. The floor upstairs creaked. It was 1.30 a.m.

She was driving through the night, feeling very tired. She had been listening to Katarina for hours. She often wondered about the weakness of these women. They let themselves be tortured, abused, murdered. Then if they survived, they sat night after night moaning about it. She didn’t understand them. As she drove through the night she actually felt contempt for them. They didn’t fight back.

It was 1 a.m. Normally she would have been asleep by now. She had to go to work early the next day. She had planned to sleep at Vollsjö, but in the end she dared to leave Katarina alone with her baby. She had convinced her to stay where she was just for a few more days, maybe a week. Tomorrow night they would call her mother again. Katarina would call and she would sit next to her. She didn’t think Katarina would say anything she wasn’t supposed to, but she wanted to be there anyway.

It was 1.10 a.m. when she drove into Ystad. She sensed the danger as soon as she turned down Liregatan and saw the parked car with its headlights off. She couldn’t turn around, she had to keep going. There were two men in the car, and she thought she could see a light in her flat too. Furious, she accelerated. The car leaped ahead, and she braked just as suddenly when she’d turned the corner. So they had found her. The ones who were watching Katarina’s house were in her flat. She felt dizzy, but she wasn’t afraid. There was nothing there that could lead them to Vollsjö. Nothing that told them who she was, nothing but her name.

She sat motionless. The wind tore at the car. She had turned off the engine and the headlights. She would have to return to Vollsjö. Now she knew why she had come here – to see if the men who were following her had got into her flat. But she was still way ahead of them. They would never catch up with her. She would keep unfolding her slips of paper as long as there was a single name left in the ledger.

She started the car, and decided to drive past her building one more time. The car was still parked there. She stopped 20 metres behind it without shutting off the engine. Even though it was some distance and the angle was difficult, she could see that the curtains in her house were drawn. Whoever was inside had turned on the light. They were searching but they wouldn’t find anything.

She forced herself to drive off slowly, without gunning the engine as she usually did. When she got back to Vollsjö, Katarina and her baby were asleep. Nothing would change. Everything would continue according to plan.

Wallander had returned to the bundle of letters when he heard quick steps on the stairs. He got up from his chair. It was Martinsson with Höglund right behind.

“I think you’d better take a look at this,” Martinsson said. He was pale, his voice shaky.

He placed a worn notebook with a black cover on the desk. It was open. Wallander leaned over and put on his glasses. There was a column of names. Each had a number in the margin. He frowned.

“Go forward a few pages,” Martinsson said.

Wallander did as he said. The column of names was repeated. There were arrows, deletions, and changes, and it looked as if it was a draft of something.

“A couple more pages,” Martinsson said.

Wallander could hear he was shaken.

The column of names appeared again. This time there were fewer changes and deletions. Then he saw it.

He recognised the first name. Gösta Runfeldt. Then he found the others, Holger Eriksson and Eugen Blomberg. At the end of the rows there were dates written in. The dates of their deaths. Wallander looked up at Martinsson and Höglund. Both of them were pale. There was no longer any doubt. They had come to the right place.

“There are more than 40 names here,” Wallander said. “You think she intends to kill them all?”

“At least we know who might be next,” Höglund said. She pointed to a name.

Tore Grundén
. Next to his name was a red exclamation mark. But there was no date in the margin.

“In the back there’s a loose sheet of paper,” Höglund said.

Wallander carefully took it out. There were meticulously written notes on it. The handwriting reminded him of Mona’s. The letters were rounded, the lines even and regular, without deletions and changes. But what was written there was hard to interpret. There were numbers, the word Hässleholm, and something that could be from a timetable: 07.50, Saturday, 22 October. Tomorrow’s date.